Educational Productivity (4/8/2009)
In WA, the governor is making waves with students by giving state colleges (and community/technical colleges) leeway to increase tuition. The students (and the ones lucky enough to have their parents pay for college) are not exactly thrilled. The governor is also recommending cuts in the number of acceptances to colleges. Ok, so here goes the obvious question... How do you define productivity in education?
Productivity in a manufacturing setting will be something like number of widgets (or whatever) produced. In a service industry (like i suspect education is) there still is a product (whether it be completing taxes, mowing lawns, “massages”). i fail to see that education actually produces any tangible product. Wouldn’t productivity in education involve “teaching” more students per “educator”. There is a reason why much of the educational system is public (it is a money pit that produces very little, if anything, in a very inefficient way). In other words the public education plan is flawed (assuming they actually have something approximating a business plan). i guess it helps that the union handicaps any educational process (keeping the public schools based of archaic conditions – like agrarian society and mindless/pointless busy work designed to train students for mindless factory work). Wouldn’t you think if school really means that much they would expand the number of days in a school year? College has some huge class sizes (not the one i went to). What does school produce? Are you going to say it produces an “educated individual”. So then, a kindergarten teacher would be responsible for one 13th of an education (or less if you get into higher grades). What kind of monetary value would you place on that? Would you say that the teacher’s productivity in a class of 30 (with one and only one class) was equal or greater than $1,067 per student expense (if salary = $32,000 a year).
i contend teachers are overpaid for the work they actually do. They work, what 190 days a year (maybe), yet the get way better than average benefits package. Teachers may be decent people with their hearts in the right place, but their concept of value is a little off. i doubt they are producing anything substantial (13 years is a long time and there are a lot of classes/teachers involved in graduating high school). By my count, i probably went through 90 instructors (6 in k-5, then 6 classes a semester after that). i know there were a lot of year long courses in there, i just want to simplify (like i remember what classes i took).
So, for the sake of illustration – let’s assume 90 instructional units (and assume each instructional unit separately). Very low estimates put the cost of “education” K-5 at about $5,000 (assuming $25K teacher salary and one teacher only – not realistic, but easier to figure out). Middle school and high school are more complicated to figure out. Let’s make some assumptions: teacher salary $25K, classes per year 12, and class size 30. If there was productivity in education it would be greater here (more total students worked with). Ok, in my example, the cost per class would be about $2,083.33; the cost per student would be about $833.28 per year ($69.44/class). The class total here goes down suggesting, perhaps higher productivity. However, the total cost went down only marginally ($833.33 before to $833.28). So net, there really isn’t better productivity (or it doesn’t show up as well in the way i calculated it. Maybe there can’t be productivity in education with constant class size). However, when you increase class size (in my example) from 30–35 students, cost savings are realized (the cost per class is constant here, the cost per student per class is reduced – from $69.44 to $59.52, the total cost for the year goes down from $833.33 to $714.28). So if you are paying for school as a taxpayer, what you really want to see is larger class sizes (better value due to higher “productivity”). Of course this doesn’t account for quality (though i am not sure that smaller class sizes present better quality of instruction). You are still looking at a minimum cost of $10K per student to go K-12 (just in instruction, way more since the average salary is over $32,000). If teachers really want smaller class sizes, blame the union. Things like requiring a master’s degree seem to be classic trade union strategies to reduce the number of people who can be hired (not to say that there are not qualified candidates) by imposing what amounts to a kickback to colleges for something that really will not improve the educational process.
Why would the colleges want to cut class sizes? Wouldn’t they make more money with more people enrolled? They could always push classes off on graduate students (where available) at a huge savings. Maybe they are just trying to push classes off on the internet (more potentially profitable area – more students, probably better productivity). Let’s say a professor teaches 3 classes that contain 30 students each. Let’s further assume that the cost per student is $100 (cheap class, easy math). That would be about $9,000 dollars in revenue from students. If the teacher salary was below that amount, why would you want to cut classes? The college could also soak the student on books, maybe room and board and other fees. i know unions (the evil useless, counterproductive beasts they are) would try to throw a wrench in it all.
Original Post: 05/17/11 (or 04/08/09 if you want to be accurate)
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